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It’s Not Looking For Friends

I’ve been feeling a trend. Not among the game, no.

Among a part of the community.

I was listening to last weeks Convert to Raid podcast when it hit me the hardest.

Preach was a guest on show #99, he has a Youtube channel where he posts vids about the game. He was there mostly to talk about a recent vid he’d done about game accessibility and community apathy. As an experiment, he took a level 90 bank alt, geared up through heroics and LFR, with a twist.

The twist?

He intentionally did zero dps, and as a capper,he stood in the fire. All of the fire.

The point?

Supposedly to see how a brand new player would see the game, what the game was designed to teach them to improve their performance, and also to see how the community would welcome such a player.

The hosts were gushing all over Preach, and all I could think was, “This whole thing reeks of bullshit.”

Preach made some points about how horrible it is that he would make a level 1 alt, and he would immediately get invited to a guild, such guilds wanting nothing more than to take advantage of new players who don’t know that guilds want low level players for no other reason than to have levelers feed their coppers into the guild coffers.

Another point made was that, as a level 90, by using every trick currently in the game for gear boosting and factions, he was able to get from 90 and no gear to having completed Throne of Thunder on LFR and killed Lei Shen after just a day. To paraphrase his point, “I saw everything the game had to offer in just one day at the level cap. Why bother joining a guild or trying to do normals? If you describe a normal raid, it sounds too much like work.”

Hey, so you’re a player who knows nothing about the game or how to play, but you’re also a player that knows every trick to gearing up and getting to the next LFR gear threshold fastest? Fucking bullshit.

And the final point… he was doing zero DPS, and standing in every horrible thing to be an active pain in the ass and make healers suffer, and nobody ever, ever said anything to him about it. Nobody offered any suggestions on how to be better, nobody raged at him, everyone ignored him completely… even in heroics. And that means the community fails.

My opinion is, this was nothing more than a way to get attention and buzz and get people talking about him, so I guess congratulations, because here we are.

The underlying assumptions are just bullshit.

His conceit requires we assume a player who has reached level 90 with no idea how to play a character at all, no idea that standing in things is bad, no guilds, no friends, nothing but a single player game of WoW, isolated and alone.

And then this player, having reached level 90, now for the first time asks in trade chat “How should I prepare for raids” and then follows the only advice he is given, to “Gear through heroics, then do LFR.”

Underlying assumptions. If we start with them weighted heavily enough, I guess we really CAN prove whatever the hell we want.

You know what I did?

I decided to test the first underlying assumption. That the community is full of apathy and nobody will help anyone, and those level 1 guild invites are evil.

I made a level 1 alt on a different realm, chose a name at random that was vaguely fantasy-ish, and started playing. No heirlooms.

Within 10 minutes, I had a guild invite and accompanying whisper.

I accepted the invite, and was greeted in a friendly way by several people.

I said, “Hi! Thank you. I’m really new to the game, um, can anyone tell me where I can find something to tell me what these buttons do?”

Guess what?

Holy crap, did I get a lot of help.

It turns out, people seem to know an awful lot about this game, and shocker! They are not only willing to share that knowledge, but they seemed very happy to be able to give advice to someone that didn’t already know it all.

I got suggestions of visiting Wowhead.com to be able to see what my specific abilities do, a suggestion to visit Tarou on Youtube to see many guides to current content, a warning that most of the videos were guides to help make gold in-game but lots of other stuff too, suggestions of MMO-Champion for the latest news, and one person took the time to take me step by step through my Spellbook and teach me how to see what I have, what specs and Talents are, how to move them onto my bar and move them around, and finally, a suggestion that I pay attention to the level 3 quest I will get that has me test an ability on a training dummy, and how I should remember that because when I get new abilities, I can put them on my bar, go to one of those training dummies in any city, and try them out.

I was also introduced to addons, DPS meters, and where to go, the Curse website, to find them.

So, an anomaly, right? I just happened to find the one guild that invites brand new players that is helpful, normally they are all evil and such. It was a fluke.

Maybe it was because I made a Draenei Hunter, and everyone loves more Hunters. Or knows they need all the help they can get.

Maybe there is a Hunter Outreach Program, people who watch for new Hunter players, and intercept them to stop the noobs.

Stop the noob. Almost sounds like a public service announcement, right?

So I went to a completely different server, and this time I made a Night Elf Warrior.

Within 15 minutes of normal playing, I got another invite to a guild.

This time, I didn’t take it. I was noobish right from the beginning, asking what the invite was for, what a guild was, etc.

They were patient, talked to me for a bit, assured me they were helpful to new players that were leveling, and I accepted the invite.

Same thing. Bunch of people, this time over 25 people online in the guild, many of whom said hi to me and ‘Welcome!’.

I said hi and admitted to being brand new, asked for help/advice, and was again drowned in a deluge of link suggestions, Youtube guides, and websites.

Amusingly enough, one of the suggestions was I should visit Preach Gaming to see his guides on how to play your class at max levels for a good idea of not just abilities, but their use in the game, addons and UIs.

So, what do I get from all this?

I get that if I were indeed that level 1 brand new player, and I did get that guild invite, and I didn’t have a preconceived impression of such guilds as selfish or evil and discarded them out of hand, if I actually gave them a chance because I wasn’t trying to build a completely bullshit point by ignoring inconvenient facts, then maybe I might get some interesting suggestions on how to learn more about playing the game. By talking to new guildies and interacting with the guild, its even possible I might make some casual acquaintances that would like to run stuff WITH me.

They might even grow to become friends, and allow me to enjoy some of what an MMO can be.

So what about the other end? What about helping people in LFR who aren’t doing as well as others, the lack of outreach, community apathy?

Here is the thing.

If I see someone in LFR, and that person is doing zero DPS, I know that in order to do nothing, nothing at all for DPS, that person has to be working hard to intentionally not touch anything.

It’s not a question of not knowing what to do. Unless that person played as a pacifist to 90 and only did Fedex quests, they have buttons that eventually kill things. To do zero, they are either on follow, which breaks on damage, or they are actively choosing not to use them to be trolls.

I have seen players like that before. I’m going to make a wild and crazy assumption; you have too.

I don’t offer them helpful suggestions, instead I put them on ignore for the worthless trolls they are. not even one point? That takes skill, yeah, um fuck you troll, bah bye /ignore.

That’s not even taking into account seeing him standing in ALL the fire.

So that just throws out anything he did in heroics or LFR. Why would you do that, and assume anyone would reach out to you to help you perform better? You’re being an asshole in a way that takes an effort. Completely worthless results.

It was only when he started to do Rogue DPS without poisons and to Rupture to be on the meters but low that he started getting any data worth a shit, and even then, how many runs were those? And again, why does he think that other players are responsible for watching what the fuck HE is doing instead of focusing on their own performance and duties?

Do you do that? Do you spend half your play time in LFR looking at each person on the meters to judge for yourself how he or she is playing their character, looking for people who need you to tell them how to play?

If so, please put Bigbearbutt and Buttflame and Beartrap on Azuremyst-US on ignore. I never want to see you, in any content, ever. You are an asshole. Focus on playing your own character, unless of course you think you fucking know everything and exist to tell other people how to play, which again, put me on /ignore.

I liked how he had to make the point that other people were lower than him on the meters. /facepalm.

To buy into what Preach is selling you have to agree with his underlying assumptions… and the key assumption to me was, new players are too introverted and shy to ask anyone in an MMO anything. Ever.

New players apparently need someone to be assigned as their friend, to tell them these things.

Worse, in Preach’s world new players aren’t capable of finding anything for themselves. They don’t look anything up, they’ve never heard of Google, they don’t look for guides, they are oblivious to anything and everything having to do with WoW, except for the login screen.

Is it that he does videos where he teaches everyone how to play their classes? Does donning the mantle of the great teacher mean everyone else is an idiot? Does he get so many stupid questions that he thinks everyone but him are stupid?

The thing that struck me the most about it was how the crew of Convert to Raid just thought it was the best thing ever, so awesome, they couldn’t stop gushing about it.

I have a big problem with so many of his conclusions, but the one that annoys the most is that the community within WoW has failed him and let him down, because nobody else took the time to see what he was doing, approach him in the LFR raid, and offer him advice on how to improve his DPS. To point out that if he equipped poisons he would perform better. Nobody took him under their wing and helped him to fly.

It is Looking For Raid. It isn’t Looking For Friends.

It is not Blizzards responsibility to build in a Looking For Friend matchmaking service.

Despite that, they actually DID take a stab at this in the recent past, or is it inconvenient to the narrative Preach is selling to recall the Guild Mentoring Program? If that wasn’t a “Looking For Friend” trial program, well, it was the next best thing.

It is not the responsibility of Blizzard to help new players make friends. Blizzard makes the MMO, and if anything, tells people “If you bring the friends you already know into the game with you, you get rewards like boosted leveling, teleporting and mounts! So go get your friends hooked too!”

You know what I took away from his video?

What I learned was you can be an intentional troll, and in some LFR groups some people have stopped spewing forth the venom and hate of Cataclysm, and instead they grit their teeth and work harder to get a victory despite your trolling.

People are indeed focused on accomplishing the mission and moving on in LFR, because it is a place where you are there for yourself. You are presumably not there with friends or family, and you are not there for progression. You enter LFR to obtain Valor, item upgrades to help in progression raids, to keep pushing on your Legendary questline and to hone your skills and improve your own game, unless you think you already know it all.

If you’re going into LFR looking for opportunities to teach other players how to play their classes, well, just damn.

LFR is just not the place for that. A huge go go go mission focused environment? A place where, just as Preach said, people are there to get the job done, and are generally moving too fast and are too successful to even leave a minute or two free without something being pulled.

That’s not a situation where you even HAVE the time to open a dialogue with a complete stranger from another server to broach the topic of playstyles and potential improvements.

You need a place where, after the raid, you can talk to the person you’d like to help in a non-stressful environment, and do so without being accusatory or threatening or derogatory.

Oh shit, look at that, Flex Raiding incoming. How about that.

Flex Raiding, easier than normal, harder than LFR, and designed for you, a group of friends, AND any pugs from your server that you’d like to bring along to help because loot isn’t competed for, it’s individual.

Guess what? By making it a mode that is good for forming pug groups on servers, it provides an opportunity for new players who haven’t raided before to join a group where people could actually see them, talk to them on the server after the raid is over, and have a lingering conversation on improving performance without publicly calling someone the fuck out.

I will say it one last way, and hope I get through.

If your expectation is that the player is not responsible for trying to improve their own skills, if you expect that the game and the experienced players within the game are responsible for seeking out under-performing players in the wild and take the steps to approach them and coach them, then you’re fucking delusional.

Helping other people is nice, but it’s not your job. Your job is to have fun on your own terms without hurting other people. Anything beyond that is gravy.

I’m going to conclude this with facts.

I went to Google, and typed in this simple search phrase; “New Player Warcraft”.

Yeah, it’s so damn hard for new players to find information about how to play the game, or get better. It’s just terrible.

Oh, if only a new player had a resource on the internet to help them! Oh, if only someone would make a website! Or a Youtube channel! Or a twitch stream, or a twitter account, or an official forum, or guilds, or or or…

Fucking get a grip.

What are these new players…. Amish?

If you require Amish to play the game to fulfill the requirements of your argument, I think it’s time to fall back and regroup.

I am a fairly experienced player, but found myself at a loss..Id looked at the Durumu fight and kinda dreaded it, so I queued up to at least try. Told a few that I hadnt done it before. Three of these players briefed me again on the fight, I told them I’d seen the video but this looked scary. so onje of them more or less gathered me under his wing and said “DPS and stay with me..stick to me like glue”, during another fight we had new players who hadnt been in L;FR before..”right side xxx move it man”…”drop back slightly”….he’s down to 10%, hit your rotation, come on man let’s DO this….

In all the runs I have done in LFR, I can count the negatives on the fingers of one hand. Players ARE ready and willing to help and the good ones, the helpful and kind ones VASTLY outnumber the jerks..no I don’t have numbers, just what I’ve experienced.

You mentioned guilds, well again all I can say is all it took was for me to raise my hand and I was deluged with ideas and tips. My very first guild inspected me, said “tsk tsk this will NOT do”..ten minutes later I’m decked out in beginner gear for my class, and as I was a warrior, one guildie walked me to a blacksmith trainer then the mining trainer and said “Follow those guides”, when I asked for help with how to make something showed me how to open the recipe book.

“Where do I find xxx ore”, “Okay xx whats the name of that site I showed you?” “Oh” “Excellent, we’ll help you but you need to remember to look things up as well, okay?” Lesson number two to a newbie :self reliance.

Mikepreach set out to prove what he had already decided to prove…and literally wasted the time and effort of a lot of people whom, Bear you are dead right, decided that he was trolling and just ignored him and got on with the job.

I literally don’t know what the hell he is on about, because my time in WOW has been a joy, have made some wonderful friends.

Could the game be better?

Sure.

So can every other game out there. This is…news?

This is my experience only and I cannot speak for others…but WOW has been and is a blast..I have loads of fun.

“Do you do that? Do you spend half your play time in LFR looking at each person on the meters to judge for yourself how he or she is playing their character, looking for people who need you to tell them how to play?”

I have come across people like that in LFR. I had one guy call me out in Raid chat for failing to do over 100k damage on a boss fight. I was quite upset about it, really. Yes, my dps wasn’t great, which is precisely why I was doing LFR, not a heroic raid. What right did he have to pick on me? None.

A friend and I usually do a scenario every day, just for fun. It’s not unusual to get people who go /afk or who do terrible dps. I just don’t care. The only reason they are there is because we have to get a random 3rd when we join the queue. We have fun whatever they do or don’t do (except wipe us by pulling the whole instance of course!). If they sit at the start point and don’t even move, it’s fine.

As for random guild invites, which happen a lot on my server if you are guildless, yes when you join you are giving the guild a % of your money every time you kill something, but it isn’t for nothing. Even in so-called social guilds where no-one speaks to anyone else, you are still getting all the guild perks that a level 25 guild has to offer. That’s the trade-off, and I don’t see why that is an issue. In the meantime if you want proper social interaction, you can make friends with people and maybe join their guild. Simple.

I agree. While I haven’t seen the video in question, from your description, his underlying assumptions are pure bollocks.

I don’t run meters, ever. I don’t know what the other dps are doing in LFR, nor do I care. I don’t know what the other healers are doing, nor do I care. As long as the fight goes reasonably well, no one tries to troll us and ppl stay civil, I’m good. If ppl start blaming the wrong area for wipes, then I get very pointed (Horridon fight, the dps were blaming the healers for not cleansing poisons. I pointed out if the DPS did their job and interrupted the poison volley in the first place, there wouldn’t be an issue).

If I heal, I can see who isn’t getting out of the bad. If I notice someone not attacking the right target repeatedly and it will affect the fight, I give them a /w. If I’m on my priest I’ll yank them away. That’s about the extent of it. I’m not responsible for the other 24 ppl in LFR. I have no reason to be inspecting them and advising them about stuff. I expect if you’re going to participate in group content, then you will attempt to do your best. You may not know about poisons, that’s fine. But standing there doing nothing while standing in bad isn’t doing your best. It’s being a dick. I don’t waste my time on morons.

I will help people though, if it happens to come up. I’ve been known to outfit complete strangers in gems because they didn’t know what to get or couldn’t afford them. I don’t mind helping people, but I’m not going to go looking for ppl to help. I’m not on some evangelistical crusade to find players who lack knowledge and help them whether they want it or not.

IMO, WoW does an extremely poor job of training new players when compared to other games. I started playing at the end of 2009. When I started, I had about 1 hour during the week (1 hour in 5 days, not 5 hrs in 5 days) and 2 or so on the weekends. It took about 6 or 7 months, but I got to max level and was a level 80. I admit during the process I had helpful suggestions from the players, go to this website, or watch this youtube video. But when you have a very limited time frame to play, as I’m sure many working professionals do, you don’t really have the luxury of going to a website or a youtube video. And the funny thing is I expect the game to teach me the skills I need in a fun way. Think about a game like Super Mario Bros (or any of its many sequels/related games), does it require you to go to any external source to learn how to beat it? No, it doesn’t. Everything you need to know to beat it you learn by playing, and much of its fun. You can go to external sources for some things, but its really not necessary. WoW is terrible in that. If getting caught in the fire is so bad, it should be teaching you that at level one and reinforcing the lesson all the way up. When I had my level 80, I had such a messed up spec I did terrible throughput in any group content. I quit the game for awhile because it was so frustrating. It wasn’t until I had more time to devote to it and not much else to do. I doubt I would have continued playing WoW if that weren’t true, but fortunately for Blizzard, I had a broken system and WoW was about the only recent game that would work on it.

Now fast forward to now, and WoW does a much better job of preventing a new player from completely shooting him/herself in the foot, but it still doesn’t teach you how to actually play the game. And IMO that in a nutshell is why you see people leave. If the game isn’t as fun as the alternatives, then why bother playing, and getting yelled at by the community to do unfun things isn’t going to motivate.

It used to teach you things like that. Once upon a time, pulling two or three mobs in the open world was extremely dangerous. More than that was positively suicidal unless you were extremely skilled with all cooldowns up. Standing in fire in a level 15 dungeon would get you killed in short order and probably wipe the party, too. It was brutal and at times frustrating, but it made you learn very quickly how to improve or die. I learned very quickly to make a macro to target and shoot the Eye of Naxxramas in Strat Dead or our party would wipe. Now, there is no real fear of death, so there is no real incentive to improve. You could easily level to 90 with the worst damage rotation in the game and be ridiculously unprepared for the sometimes highly judgmental PUGs (like my sub rogue, who does abysmal dps, and often gets kicked for it– never given advice, always a kick). While part of the fun of an MMORPG is improving your skill, so you can’t compare it to something like Mario, compared to some more modern MMOs it does a poor job at it. I do think part of the problem is they made it too easy to succeed with mediocre or poor skill, so there is no real incentive to improve.

Actually, pulling like that is only NOT dangerous if you are in heirloom gear. If you go to the normal whites+greens+1-2 blues (some of which are 10-15 levels old), you will find that it is very challenging to pull 3 mobs and still survive.
And standing the fire is still dangerous. Assuming you aren’t in full heirloom gear, or don’t have a tank and/or healer with full heirlooms.
Think about it. A healer in full heirloom can cast ONE heal and take a fully heirloomed (is that a word?) TANK from 1% to 100% health. They can definitely keep you from dying in the fire. Heirlooms make a character so OP (especially when you have the equivalent of blues in slots that you wouldn’t normally even have filled — head, trinkets, shoulders all start showing up later) that they make the dungeon easy for everyone else.

Along with that is this: If you make leveling dungeons so hard that people wipe over and over because 1 person can’t figure out how to quickly shoot the Eye of Naxxramas, and the others are melee + a healer in non-heirlooms (can’t kill the eye @ range) then people just aren’t going to run dungeons and their first taste will be @ level 90 where they are expected to know how to work in a group (maybe not @ “super” level, but at least understand that the tank pulls, standing in fire is bad, etc)

That’s the problem isn’t it? The game needs to teach these skills in a fun way. But most ways of teaching is negative. You die if you fail. You don’t progress unless you learn. You’re not forced to learn these skills before you progress.

Its easy to say how it should work, hard to actually come up with a workable implementation. Some games do it much better tho. Take DA:O and DA2 for example. If you don’t learn how to use your abilities in the proper way, you don’t progress. And the game provides fun ways to learn these abilities. Even SWTOR does a better job than WoW IMO.

Anyways, I still think the majority of new players just wont bother doing things like forums or even youtube. People play games to play em, not to read or watch kill strat videos…

There are so many flaws in his “experiment”. For one thing, it is impossible to believe that a person who somehow managed to reach max level without learning to use a single action on his bar would be able to find his way into LFR in the first place. Well, actually, in the first place, it’s impossible to believe that someone reached 90 AND got geared enough to queue for LFR without learning to use a single action on his bar. Also, if you are doing zero actions in the fight, you are not even showing up on the meters. So assuming someone had time between pulls to peruse recount and look for people who may need his immediate and undivided attention in order to LTP, he would then have to compare the recount list with all the raid frames to single out the one person who was just standing in the back with his thumb up his butt. Not a likely scenario in LFR.

Granted, the healers would undoubtedly notice the guy who just could not be healed because he stood in every bad possible, but with everything else going on in the middle of the fight, they would probably just say, “Okay, die then if you are so determined to commit suicide” and focus on the other 24 people. At least, that is what I would do if I were a healer, which I’m not, but yeah.

This is not to say that apathy does not exist in the game. There are people who just want to log in, do their thing and they don’t give a rat’s behind about you doing your thing unless it interferes with their thing. And that is okay. They pay their subscription fee to play the way they want to play. If they don’t want to run tutorial sessions for new players, it is their choice. And yes, there are complete and utter asshats playing. We’ve all seen the request for help in trade chat which gets a reply of “that’s what’s the interwebs is for, learn to google” or even worse, completely wrong answers. This is not okay (imo). I will generally whisper the person the answer if I know it. And if I do not, I will whisper them with a suggestion of a website that might hold the answer. I have even, on occasion, googled it myself and then told them. But that is my OCD kicking in because I DID NOT KNOW /gasp. And *that* is another story.

I have not seen the video and based upon it’s description will not add a “view” to his count. He set the WoW community up to fail, so he should not be surprised when (in his view) they did just that. He reached a conclusion, then skewed the experiment to support it. BTW, I loved the fact that you created characters on different servers, asked for help and then gave the community the opportunity to either ignore, support or engage in general asshattery. Well played, BBB, well played.

These are the Bear posts I love. In my experience if you don’t carry your weight in LFR, someone will call you out. Just this week for the first time since LFR was started my wife was in a group with a troll who caused the group to wipe 3 times before he was singled out. Good times for everyone!

I don’t think bitter cynicism takes the form of rage you just did. That’s more passion than anger. Rather, whoever this douchebag is you’re talking about has opted out of the system, hands in the air. He’s a quitter, just complaining about bullshit.

I do think the douchebag is right that there’s apathy, but he’s wrong about who we are apathetic about. We’re content to ignore the trolls. I suppose that’s how it should be.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this. You also touched on the fact that match-made groups are innately different than PUGs, particularly PUGs before LFG/LFR existed. LFR/LFG are great if you just want to get content done, but because they’re so easily accessible and since you will likely never see the players in the group again, all most people want is enough competence to get things done. Barely doing any dps? Who cares as long as the bosses die, and LFG/LFR content is largely tuned so that’s going to happen. If the boss doesn’t die, it’s much easier to kick folks who aren’t carrying their weight, since dps slots fill so quickly.

I think that was a little different in PUGs in the pre-LFR/LFG era. If someone in a group wasn’t pulling their weight, do you take a few minutes to check and see if you can help them with their rotation/spec/gear choices, or do you drop them, go back to Ironforge/Shatt/Dal and spam trade for a replacement? As a newbie hunter in TBC who was initially quite clueless once I hit 70, I joined groups that did both, but I think the likelihood that people would choose option A and try to help you was a bit higher, since it wasn’t so trivial to refill the group. I met some folks in a PUG Mana Tombs run that choose option A, and they ended up being my first raiding guild. I really hope that the combination of flex raid and virtual realms brings a little of that back, but we’ll see.

I had mildly similar experience last night in the middle of doing a random on a mage alt I hadn’t previously touched in years. Random guild invite and whisper with lots of helpful information. The playerbase is absolutely friendly and helpful if you meet them a smidgen of the distance.

Well said Bear. I did see Preach’s video and I found it entertaining and intersting at least, not to say I agree with it all. I think in some cases he has some valid points, but what he was doing is obviously not the end all, be all of playing this game. You make some very valuable points as well, and I always enjoy coming here to see what you have to say, even during those times when I havent been playing. You are a very passionate writer and I enjoy your blog a lot.

I don’t think, as he said, the “apathy” of the game can be a problem, though I sort of understand why he said it. You can look up videos until your blue in the face, read strattegy guides until your eyeballs pop out, etc but until you actually try something AND have help as well, you won’t get very far in Normals to Heroics. I think the problem is more of the bad attitudes that the player base has at times…. For example, the other night I’m in LFR and the off tank has never been there before. He doesn’t tell the raid that, but he does apparently whisper back and forth with the other tank about what to do. So, on Elegon, he makes some mistakes with the adds and we end up wiping, so then it comes out that he is new. Curses and insults then get unleashed, even despite the fact the main tank admitted he forgot to mention somethng to him and tried to take a little responsibility. So what happens? Does he get forgiven? No, a vote kick is initiated on the spot, so we can get a new tank. Luckliy, it didnt go thru and we downed the boss on the next attempt, but I’m sure the off tank felt embarrassed and rejected by the whole thing, and who is to say he will play in the LFR again because of it……. People just kill me…

Some people don’t have the balls to stick their colours to a flag, pure and simple. It is easier to default to a safe, large-audience friendly middle ground. A lot of the problem with ‘mainstream’ news sites is this desire not to upset anyone whilst at the same time presenting something challenging and thought-provoking. Needless to say, I KNOW for a fact you’ve said something here that lots of people will utterly agree with, but are quite likely to be too afraid to elucidate.

If you’re going to try and make a point, you need a decent, balanced argument to do so. This video is doomed as a result, and the attitude, however much some people may consider it relevant, is flawed.

Keep up the Revolution, Bear. This place would be a far poorer place without you and your opinions in it.

“Do you do that? Do you spend half your play time in LFR looking at each person on the meters to judge for yourself how he or she is playing their character, looking for people who need you to tell them how to play?

If so, please put Bigbearbutt and Buttflame and Beartrap on Azuremyst-US on ignore. I never want to see you, in any content, ever. You are an asshole. Focus on playing your own character, unless of course you think you fucking know everything and exist to tell other people how to play, which again, put me on /ignore.”

I’ve got to say, I disagree a bit with this part, the rest hell yeah ;p I rarely look at meters much, but if I do see someone doing really badly and I’m feeling helpful, I will inspect them, look at their ‘damage done by action’ and if I think they’re doing something wrong rather than just another afk’ing troll, I’ll try whispering them some advice. Sometimes I get people grateful for the help, I think that (disregarding OQ added people) about a quarter of my bnet list is made up of people who’ve either asked my advice or I’ve offered it and we’ve ended up chatting, became friends. A good % of whispers I get are from people I’ve spoken to asking me questions on various things, though if I get one more person asking me how to do Hexos in Brawlers Guild I’m putting them all on ignore, I can’t bloody do it either with my connection! ;p

There’s a difference between the ego-inflated trolls whispering people stuff like ‘lol u suck 50k dps i did at 80 l2p’ and people actually trying to tell you something useful.

There’s also the reason more people AREN’T helpful, which is that for every person you get who wants to be better and is happy to get a few tips on how, there’s 3 or 4 who just don’t care and respond with abuse. Like Matticus says, sometimes you try and help people and get burned. Luckily I have a very thick skin and for me, the thanks from people who’ve appreciated a bit of help more than balances the feeble attempts at insults from the ones who didn’t. My friends and I have been insulting each other for 30 years and we’re damn good at it, there’s really nothing much random people on wow can come up with to bother me!

I enjoy reading your opinions on topics like this. It is a refreshing POV that I don’t see much of. I tend to agree with most of what you say about the game and the community.

As I healer I get really annoyed by people who stand in stuff and make no attempt to move. On hard fights I can’t take the time to call people out on it, but if we wipe I offer general advise on how to correct mistakes so we can kill the boss. If someone asks for help I will gladly give it, but I don’t go searching for people who look like they need help. Help has to be asked for, not waited on.

I actually don’t mind LFR if I go into it not caring about other’s performance. When I first started LFR I would get annoyed by people doing the wrong thing. Then I realized this wasn’t like a Normal raid group, where you could discuss problems and help people get better. I can only control myself and my reactions, so I stopped worrying about dps and just focused on downing the bosses.

Really excited about Flex raiding. It has potential to let me raid again, because if I can’t make it, or have to leave early, I’m not forcing the group to have to find a replacement for me.

LFR is just a jungle and most of the times the tanks are chain pulling and you get not time to chat with others.

Even then, I just look at the other warlocks in the raid, to compare spec performance and how they gear up. As long as bosses are dieing (and most of the time they are), I don’t nitpick on anyone’s performance.

Agree. When you’re on LFR, I find that it’s no mans land. I might check out the DPS of the guy who’s ABOVE me to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Maybe there’s something I can learn and pick up from him. I don’t care about the people below me one bit. I’m concerned about my characters rotations. I’m trying to practice how to play my mage or my shaman on LFR to make sure I hit my cooldowns and spells in the right fashion.

That being said though, I HAVE received tells across server in LFR from other players and readers. And in some cases they’ll ask a question or three and I’ll happily answer them in between (and even let my DoTs drop, thats how much I care guyz!)

I’d wager that anyone queuing into any kind of instance has a basic understanding of the game. Even if it’s just a one button Fireball or something. But honestly, I’m not going to go out of my way to assist people in the game largely because I’ve been burned that way before.

“Fuck you, I know what i’m doing.” OK man, sure no prob. And I’ll just leave ’em alone after that. Like Dumbledore once said, “Help will always be given … to those who ask for it.”

Really glad to see somebody else in the community who has a positive attitude toward LFR and to what it brings players. So much of what I read in blogs is aimed at the top 1% of players. Now that might be that only the top 5-10% read logs, but hey – that is not my experience either.